G4S equips the apartheid wall, Israel confirms

The company whose logo appears on police staff uniforms in the UK and dropped the Olympics contract has far reaching impact on multiple security settings.

The British-Danish
security giant G4S has become the
target of rights activists in different countries because of its provision
of services to Israeli prisons, military checkpoints and to firms in illegal
settlements in the West Bank.

Who Profits? G4S Israel advertised its role in Eretz checkpoint on its website.

In 2008, G4S Israel
advertised its involvement with Israeli miitary checkpoints on its website. The
text on the left of the screenshot above reads: “Systems for checking persons,
manufactured by Safeview USA, first of their kind, were installed at the Erez
checkpoint. The systems are in operational use by the army and enable the
performance of full scans of the human body.”

G4S confirmed it had
provided security equipment with “associated maintenance services” to the
Israeli police, prison service and defense ministry, in a 21 December 2010
letter to the Business and Human Rights Resource Center
in London. At the same time, the company claimed it did “not control” — and was
not “necessarily aware” — where its security equipment was deployed “as
it may be moved around the country.”

Lack of transparency

G4S’s claim that it
did not know where its security equipment was deployed sounds implausible. In
2008, the campaign group Who Profits? found evidence on G4S Israel’s website
that the firm supplied equipment to the checkpoints of Bethlehem, Qalandiya near Ramallah, Irtah near Tulkarem, and Erez near Gaza. Who
Profits? published the information in a March 2011 report on G4S. Although the
information is no longer available on the company’s website, the screenshots
capturing the pages with the information can be found in thereport by Who Profits?.

The text on the left
of the screenshot reads: “Personal luggage scanning machines manufactured
by Rapiscan USA were installed in the Seam Zone crossings [checkpoints which
are located along the route of the wall] including the Qalandiya crossing, the
Bethlehem crossing, the Sha’ar Efraim [Irtah] crossing and more.”

Confirmation

In order to obtain
more clarity about G4S’s involvement in Israel’s military checkpoints, Who
Profits? filed a request under the Israeli Freedom of Information Act. A reply
from the defense ministry in July 2012 confirmed that ”G4S is one of the
companies that provides inspection [services] and scanning equipment to all the
Israeli checkpoints along the separation wall [in the West Bank],” wrote Who
Profits? in an email to me on 19 November 2012. Click here for a detailed map of the wall
and the checkpoints.

In an interview with The
Electronic Intifada, London lawyer Simon Natas addressed G4S’s role in Israel’s
violations of international law. The provision of technical equipment and
maintenance for checkpoints is particuarly problematic, he said. The
International Court of Justice found that the construction of the wall on
Palestinian land was illegal in 2004. Excerpts of the interview follow below:

The court talked not
only about the wall, but about the wall and its associated regime. It
considered that “the construction of the wall and its associated regime create
a fait accompli on the ground that could well become permanent in which case
and notwithstanding the formal characterization of the wall by Israel it would
be tantamount to de facto annexation.”

When one talks about
the associated regime of the wall, one certainly talks about the checkpoints,
because the wall cannot operate without checkpoints.

So the checkpoints
are necessary in order to allow Israelis access to the West Bank [and] to
prevent Palestinians from passing the other way. If you are providing the
technical facilities like scanners and other equipment, and you also have a
contract to look after them, to fix them when they go wrong, to ensure that
they are working properly, then you are assisting in that process by ensuring
that the checkpoints can effectively regulate the movement of people through
the wall.

The system of checkpoints connected to the
wall is designed to limit and control the movement of Palestinians within the
West Bank. In addition, they are used to give Israelis access to illegal
settlements located in the West Bank. As such, the checkpoints serve Israeli
settlement policies. By providing inspection services and security services to
the military checkpoints, G4S assists Israel in strengthening its grip on the
occupied West Bank and has become complicit in Israel's unlawful settlement
enterprise.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
If you have any queries about republishing please contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.

Security for the future: in search of a new vision

What does ‘security’ mean to you? The Ammerdown Invitation seeks your participation in a new civic conversation about national security in the UK and beyond. Its authors offer an analysis of the shortcomings of current approaches and propose a different vision of the future. Please use the invitation summary document for seminars, workshops and public meetings, and share the responses and insights that emerge.